


Burn Them All

by Copperonthetongue



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Character Study, F/M, Family Feels, Gen, Other, Self-Destruction, Self-Reflection, The Author Regrets Nothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 02:13:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14345802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Copperonthetongue/pseuds/Copperonthetongue
Summary: As Jaime watches the Dothraki horde pour over the horizon like a shrieking, thunderous wave he thinks that the situation cannot possibly get any worse. He's wrong, as usual.





	Burn Them All

**Author's Note:**

> This scene has been picking at me since the episode aired, so I've finally given in and decided that I might as well write it so It can stop bugging me. Jaime is a complex character and I hope I manage to do him justice here, and as always comments are love and I'm looking forward to the feedback. Without further ado, here's some Jaime feels.

 

Jaime was certain they still had a chance, even as he watched the Dothraki pouring over the horizon like a shrieking, thunderous wave he was not in his heart convinced that all was lost. He knew that the Dothraki were fierce, and while he wasn’t the scholar of history Tyrion was, or the tactician that his father had been, he had, despite all appearances to the contrary, actually been paying attention to his Maester’s lessons. His grasp of military tactics was as solid and reliable as was to be expected from a man of his station.

 

Jaime believed that the Horse Lords were; if not a surmountable force, then at the very least they were a tide that could be stemmed just long enough to achieve his goal, which was to get those God’s bedamned Highgarden supplies and all that glittering Tyrell gold into King’s Landing where it belonged. He wasn’t fool enough to think that they could WIN a battle in an open field with the Dothraki. A man would need to be either simple minded or mad to think such a ridiculous thing and last he’d checked he was neither, although he was near certain that if anybody cared to ask Cersei she’d be delighted to argue the point. The plain and simple truth was that winning wasn’t necessarily what mattered here…all Jaime had to do was hold the line long enough to get those supplies where they were most needed.

He’d received many scathing insults over the years, most of which focused on his many deficiencies of character, recklessness being first amongst them. He could admit at least to himself that he was indeed a man of action rather than contemplation, thus it was a charge even Jaime himself found difficult to deny. Quick on the heels of recklessness always came pride and once again that was a charge he could not argue. He was indeed a proud man. Did he not have reason to be? He was a Lannister of Casterly Rock and there had been dark times in which that pride had been all he’d had with which to defend himself. No matter what else happened, he was a Lannister…that could not be taken from him, and lions did not concern themselves with the opinions of sheep. 

 

Tywin Lannister himself had often lamented his mule headed stubbornness, which had never failed to amuse Jaime since it had been from Tywin himself that he’d come by that particular trait. Jaime was never fool enough to point that out to the man of course, but he’d often thought it while standing for a lecture after some youthful misdeed or other. A more stubborn man had never been born than Tywin of House Lannister. One fault that Jaime would in truth like to correct happened to be that he possessed a viper’s tongue. That scathing, ready wit of his had gotten him into more trouble than it was worth since the moment he learned to talk. It was well known at court that Jaime Lannister could flay a man to bone with his words just as easily as he had once been able to do with a sword.

All those flaws, yet amongst their number had never once been stupidity.

 

Regardless of what his father and little brother might have believed of him, he was keenly aware that the lumbering supply train they escorted was more valuable than the life of any man in his army. Including his own. They desperately needed what those carts carried in King’s Landing for the oncoming Winter, else the Dragon Queen and the Bastard King in the North would be the least of their fucking problems in very short order indeed. Hunger could drive men mad, and Jaime knew without a doubt that failure here would mean that all the Targaryen girl would need to do to take the city would be to wait, and she could at her leisure watch Kings Landing tear itself apart from within as the people starved and turned on one another.

 

Surrendering those wagons was out of the question, even though it seemed that the likelihood of their success on the field was slim and growing slimmer by the moment. Jaime cousin’t risk the Targaryen girl having them should she win the day. He knew that food was more precious than gold, and that many lives would be lost along with it should he fail to stand against the Dothraki. It would not be the fighters or the nobles that starved, oh no. it would be the smallfolk and there was nothing he could do to avoid it. An army traveled on it’s belly, and with Winter coming the times would be lean indeed and with a thousand wagons of food and other essential supplies on her side and her current forces, the War would be over before it even truly began. He would burn them to ash, himself, before he let the Dragon Queen take them, peasants bedamned . 

 

He could not flee, that much was clear and as Jaime watched the seemingly endless horde of Dothraki savages thundering towards them in dismy, he was stricken mute with horror for the first time in his entire life. His ready tongue had no jests for this. He was also slowly filled with the profound desire to punch himself in the face for his own reckless stupidity. Yet even as he watched the army bearing down on them he did his best to comfort himself that the situation could not possibly get any worse than it already was.

 

Then on the heels of that thought, an echoing roar ripped through the noontime air, announcing the presence of the last Targaryen on the field of battle. To his shock, Jaime realized that Daenerys Stormborn herself had come in person to join the fray. He’d been wrong. Again. It seemed to be becoming an unfortunate habit of his. It could absolutely get worse and as he stared in disbelief at the massive creature headed straight for them, the shadow of it’s wings filling the horizon he at last felt the bitter sting of despair. 

 

He could see here there, astride the largest of her dragons, a massive black and scarlet beast that looked large enough to swallow a cart horse whole. He’d seen the skulls of the Targaryen dragons in the Red Keep of course. Everybody had, they had been a symbol of Targaryen power from the moment Aegon the Conqueror had laid claim to the Seven Kingdoms and they had been impressive enough…but they were only dead, dry bones, empty of flesh and fire and none of them did justice to the horror and terror that a living, breathing, fire spitting dragon inspired. 

 

All the confidence and hope Jaime had clung so desperately to crumbled to ash in the wind and blew away as if it had been doused in dragonfire as he watched the great black and scarlet monster shriek it’s fury at them again. There was no winning this, now. Nor any hope that he could hold fast long enough to get the wagons to the city. He had failed Cersei once again. From the moment that dragon took the field with Daenerys Targaryen on it’s back they had one and all been doomed. The sound the beast made was a nightmarish thing, unlike anything else he had ever heard. It clawed its way into Jaime’s chest like a worm into an apple, making his pounding heart leap into his throat in instinctive, animal terror. Every bone in his body screamed at him to flee. 

That was death, winging it’s way swiftly towards them, scarlet eyes aglow with fury and hunger and sitting on it’s broad back, silver hair shining in the sunlight as only Targaryen hair ever could, was vengeance made flesh. Lannisters always paid their debts, or so the saying went…and to Jaime’s bitter realization, it seemed so did Targaryens, and his would be paid in fire and blood. 

 

Somewhere in the lowest pit of the Seven Hells Jaime fancied he could hear the Mad King laughing. 

 

Time seemed to slow around him, the whole world frozen in that awful moment, he could neither speak nor move but there seemed to be ample time for regret. He’d never felt anything like the morbid dread that filled him as he watched that dragon winging it’s way over the battlefield, not even when he’d sat covered in his own filth and half starved on the muddy ground in Robb Stark’s camp for the better part of a year, waiting endlessly for the boy’s patience to finally run out and set that monstrous wolf on him.

 

Daenerys Targaryen had come for him at last and there was a strange sort of relief in it, tangled up in all his terror. He’d been waiting twenty years to pay the price for what he’d done to mad Aerys, and for what he had allowed to be done to poor, gentle Princess Elia, little Rhaenys and baby Aegon. In a way he welcomed it. It was the one thing he had never been able to forgive himself for.

 

He still remembered how awful it had felt, standing in the throne room as Robert Baratheon climbed the steps of the Iron Throne and seated himself upon it, blood still streaking his armor and bits of brain and flesh caught in the scrollwork of his massive warhammer. He’d watched in silent misery as his father laid those small gore soaked bundles that had once been living, laughing children at the new King’s feet. 

 

The shame of his failure had felt like it would drown him, then. Sometimes he wished it had. One tiny hand had somehow escaped the blood stained white shroud that swathed little Rhaenys, and he hadn’t been able to look away from it no matter how hard he tried. The image of that tiny hand burned itself into his mind and heart like a brand. It had been so very small, bright blue inkstains still on her tiny fingertips, left over from her studies with the Maester that afternoon… and twenty years later it still haunted his dreams. As fresh and awful now as it had been that day.

 

Jaime avoided thinking of Rhaenys for years. The memory of her was barbed and tangled with guilt for him and so he had done his best to forget her. He never had, of course…but he had certainly tried. She would not be forgotten now, however and in the endless space between one heartbeat and the next he found himself a young man once more, back at the foot of the Iron Throne, trying not to weep in front of his father or the other men as he looked down at the red ruin that had once been a little girl. That had once been his friend. A little girl whose only sin had been sneaking sweets from the kitchen to share with her kitten, a kitten Jaime himself had given her for her nameday and putting frogs in her Septa’s bed. He’d gotten her the frogs too. 

Rhaenys had always liked him best of all the Kingsguard, and his own favorite days had been the ones where he was assigned to look after the little princess. Guarding Aerys was more punishment than honor to his mind so Rhaenys became a refuge for him and it had never once bothered him that the others teased him for it, and called him a glorified nursemaid. He would rather be a nursemaid than dance attendance on a monster like the one King Aerys had become. They could keep their honor, Jaime would choose Rhaenys and sunlight and laughter before the stink of burning flesh and the bitter odor of Aerys long unwashed body any day.

 

That small hand had just that morning been tangled in the hem of his white cloak, the little princess trying stubbornly to pull him along to the nursery to watch over her instead of Ser Bors, who she had not liked half so much and who had little patience for small girls. He had tousled her soft hair and promised her that he’d come to play with her later, and as he watched the blood seep slowly from that shroud onto the stone floor of the throne room, he realized that later would now never come, his well intentioned promise had become yet another broken oath. Unlike the others, this one sliced his soul to the bone. 

Rhaenys would never tug on his cloak again, never smile at him or laugh at his jokes and it was all his fault. He should have stayed with her. He should have told her to hide. He’d felt then as if he would go mad from the weight of all the things he hadn’t done but should have. She was dead because he had never believed his father would murder children. He should have known better, they wrote songs about Tyein Lannister’s ruthlessness for fuck’s sake. He should have known that the children would not survive the taking of the Red Keep. He’d been wrong, then. Just as he’d been wrong about the Dothraki now and it seemed that it was at long last, time to pay the butcher’s bill for his errors. 

Jaime had always assumed it would be the boy, if anyone, that would come for him demanding an accounting, but he should have known better. Viserys had been too much like his father, and Aerys had ever and always been a shite tactician with the patience and focus of a particularly dim gnat. Queen Rhaella had been by leagues more formidable than her husband though she’d hidden it well, had she not been cunning enough to escape with both her children to the relative safety of Dragonstone where the King and Princess Elia had failed to do the same?

 

He could have dealt with Viserys more easily than his sister Daenerys, he was sure. He would have understood his motivation better. Time lent everything a rosier glow. Including terrible fathers. Jaime understood the impulse for revenge all too well. It was much easier to love Tywin too, now that he was dead, but the girl had been born after Aerys was cold in the ground. She had never known him, yet here she was all the same. Rhaella’s ghost come to haunt him. 

 

He couldn’t run now, there was no use in trying it. They’d be caught soon enough for no horse could outrun a dragon, not even his fine white mare. So he would not run. Jaime was resolved to face the last Targaryen with what little remained of his honor and dignity. It was easy to be brave it seemed when one had no other option, then the endless frozen moment that had held him for so long at last shattered like Myrish glass and the dragon was upon them and there was no more time for thinking or remembering or regrets. Only surviving the onslaught. 

 

Fire rained down on them from above, carving a flame scorched hole in their shield wall and moments later Jaime watched in numb horror as the Dothraki rode right through the fire and shattered their lines like they were made of paper. The battle was nothing of the kind, it was a slaughter and all around him his men died screaming in agony as curtains of dragonfire blasted them and Dothraki Arakhs cleaved their flesh from their bones. 

 

The world around them was now composed of sweat and smoke and the screams of horses and dying men as the Dothraki tore their formation apart from within and without. The dragon circling overhead and diving again and again, laying down sheets of dragonfire as it went to keep the bulk of the army from escaping, from reforming to attempt any sort of defense, driving them mercilessly back into the hungry teeth of the Dothraki horde like panicked deer instead of men. 

 

The dragon made another pass, lower to the ground, maddening the horses and oxen that pulled the supply wagons and it was all Jaime could do to keep from panicking himself in the face of the destruction raining down around him. His voice didn’t shake as he ordered his men to ready their bows, but he was sweating in his armor from more than the terrible heat, and his guts were watery with terror. Nothing he did made any impact on the dragon, arrows bounced off the scaled hide of the creature like water and there was no way to reach it with a blade or spear while it flew. It was unstoppable and so far as he knew there was only one chance they had to bring the beast down.

 

Qyburns scorpion was their only hope, and Jaime ordered Bronn to man it, his golden hand rendered him useless at the task himself. It would have to be Bronn. If any man could hit a dragon in mid-flight while staring down the specter of his own death it would be Ser Bronn of the Blackwater. Though Jaime knew that even that hope was a distant one at best. When Meraxes had fallen in Dorne to a scorpion it had been a lucky shot that slew her, and more fate than skill had planted that bolt in the dragon’s eye to put an end to fair Rhaenys and her dragon both. 

Jaime watched the beast arc languidly once more over the battlefield, coming around for another pass, and as it dove he realized that she wasn’t aiming for the army at all. Not this time. No. She had another target. The mad bitch was burning the wagons. Jaime was numb with misery and despair as he watched the sheet of dragonfire turn them to so much ash in the span of only a moment.

 

As Jaime listened in misery to the shrieking agony of his dying men around him, as he breathed in the acrid stench of their burning flesh and of their emptied bowels, a charnel house miasma that made his gorge rise and his skin tighten, he hated her at last. He hated Danaerys Targaryen not for the blood she bore, or because the man who had fathered her had done so on his unwilling wife while Jaime had listened helplessly outside their chamber door as she screamed, at last he could say he hated her only for herself. The smell around him was so thick and familiar he could almost hear Aerys howling once more.

‘Burn them, burn them all.’ the old man laughing as he fed living, wailing men to the flames like kindling, green wildfire reflecting in his mad, red rimmed purple eyes. A demon of the Seven hells made flesh and blood and bone.

Hot ash stuck to Jaime’s face and coated his dry tongue as he wheeled his horse away from the wall of flame that erupted where his men had been only moments before, turning his face as the wind from the Dragon’s wings shattered their ashen forms and scattered them to the four winds, gone as if they had never been. 

She was a monster, Jaime realized. She was just as her sire had been, only unlike him, no one could stop her. She was Aerys come again, but this time with three dragons at his beck and call. Mother of Monsters, she was, and his hatred for her was so tangled in memory and terror that he could not separate the one from the other. Jaime was certain, down to the marrow of his bones and the blood in his veins that Daenerys Targaryen could burn the world to ash and dust and it would never satisfy her, just as it had never satisfied Aerys. 

 

No matter how many he burned there were always more traitors, more men, women and children to feed the flames with. Good men, bad men, young and old, highborn or low…none of that had mattered to the Mad King. His hunger had been as vast and endless as that of the flames he so worshiped. It was why Jaime had killed him. Aerys would have burned all of King’s Landing to ash before he let Robert Baratheon or anyone else take the throne, including his own children and only Jaime could prevent it. 

 

Only he had been in a position to make sure that the order he gave never reached willing ears. If Aerys had given that command to Ser Barristan, Kings Landing would have been a smoking ruin instead of a city even now. The noble, honorable old knight would have done his duty. Kept his oath. Thankfully, Jaime was not Barristan Selmy. He was Jaime Lannister of Casterly Rock, son of Lord Tywin Lannister and Lady Joanna Lannister and so instead of burning the city as his king commanded he’d put his sword through the mad cunt’s skinny back and cut his wrinkled throat as well so that even in death that order would never leave his lips again. 

 

If Jaime had done one thing right in his life, one noble thing of which he could be proud, it was killing that mad bastard where he stood and no matter what name they called him afterwards, no matter how they whispered about him and sneered at him at court, behind hands and fans and closed chamber doors Jaime had never once regretted it. Not once.

 

The closest he had ever come to such a thing had been in the baths with Brienne, when he had been fevered and hurting and trying desperately to hold himself together with only the tatters of his ruined pride while she glared daggers at him with her cornflower blue eyes. Eyes so full of condemnation and accusation that they struck at the heart of him like a poisoned blade. Almost against his will he had at long last, vomited out the poison that had been choking on for the last twenty years. 

 

Jaime had told her why, as he had not bothered to do before for anyone else, save his brother and Cersei…and like a benediction from the gods themselves she had understood. Brienne of Tarth was the most honorable person he had ever known, a woman who exemplified all that it meant to be a knight of the realm, loyal and true, a protector of the weak and defender of all that was right and good and just. Like one of those impossibly heroic figures in the tales his mother had read to him by candle light when he was a child, but real and somehow she had understood why he had done what he had done, and the disdain had melted from the frozen blue of her eyes, like spring thaw come after winter….and instead of being the Kingslayer, a name he had worn with both pride and bitterness for far longer than he cared to think of, he was at last only Ser Jaime. It had been a balm to his aching, wounded soul that he hadn’t even known he needed. 

If Brienne of Tarth could forgive his sin, then perhaps all the good in him was not lost forever, bled out on the cold stone floor that haunted his nightmares and woke him trembling more nights than not. 

Suddenly a shrill cry of agony rang out from the direction of the Scorpion and Jaime looked up in wonder to see the dragon begin to tumble from the sky like a stone, wailing as it fell. Bronn’s aim had been true! The beast was hurt, and Jaime prayed like he had never prayed before that it would keep falling, that it would hit the ground and shatter as Meraxes had, crushing the Dragon Queen beneath it and ending once and for all the poison that was the Targaryen bloodline. 

Just as that hope began to bloom in Jaime’s chest the gods saw fit to snatch it away again for even as he watched the creature laboriously began to pull itself out of it’s death spiral, great wings slowing it’s fall until it hovered before the scorpion and burnt it, and more likely than not Ser Bronn of the Blackwater as well to ash. 

 

Then, the most slender of chances presented itself. The bolt had not killed the beast, but it was hurt…and that hurt had driven it to the ground at last. A dragon in the air was nigh invincible to all but another dragon but on the ground they were vulnerable, and as Jaime watched the Targaryen queen dismount her beast the most slender of hopes kindled inside him. Her back was turned as she struggled to pull a scorpion bolt longer than she was tall from the creature’s wing, while the monster itself snarled and shrieked in pain. She would never see him coming for her until it was too late, and the dragon was well distracted by it’s own suffering.

 

His gaze drifted to a lance that was thrust into the earth only a few yards ahead and Jaime felt the hair on the back of his neck rise as he realized what he must do. All his life, Jaime had trained for a moment like this one, he realized suddenly. Every choice he had made, every path he had taken, every mistake and triumph had brought him to this moment. To this place, and the deed that lay before him. What was his life, if by giving it he could spare the world a second Aerys? 

Jaime drove his spurs into the flanks of his fine white mare, and as she leapt forward he leaned over his saddle bow to pluck the lance from the earth, tucking it under his arm as he had a thousand times on the tourney field. He kicked the mare into a gallop, and headed straight for Daenerys Targaryen and her dragon. 

 

The world slowed around him again as his horse’s hooves thundered over the earth, and he thought of Cersei. Of her smile as she lay Joffrey in his arms the day he’d been born, before even the king had touched him, golden hair still damp from the waters of her womb. He thought of Myrcella, who had known he was her father and loved him still. Who has been glad of it, and of Tommen who had been the gentlest of his children and in who he saw the best of himself and of Cersei. Who would have made a fair and just King unlike his elder brother and Robert before him. The King the Seven Kingdom had deserved. He thought of Brienne, and her crooked teeth and cornflower blue eyes as she bid him farewell at River Run, and how he had longed to go with her, to be the man he saw reflected in her guileless gaze. 

Jaime hoped she would forgive him this, as she had what he had done to Aerys. The distance was closing between himself and his target and at last he could feel the heat radiating from the Dragon’s body, yet he never took his eyes from his target’s slender back. Not even for a moment. 

“ Keep your eye on the prize, boy!” he heard his Uncle Kevan say, as he had a thousand times on the practice field. “ If you look away you’ve already lost.” The Targaryen girl turned at the last moment, and he could see the fear in her wide purple eyes as she saw him, as she realized that his lance was headed directly for her wicked heart. 

‘You will never be your father. I will not allow it.’ Jaime thought as he grit his teeth and braced for the impact he knew was coming, but just as he was certain that victory was at hand, that it would be over at last….the Dragon put it’s head between Jaime and it’s mother, and Jaime knew that his sacrifice had been for nothing, his one consolation was that at least he had tried. He had given all he had, but it simply had not been enough, he braced himself for the flames he saw kindling in the creature’s gullet, for death……and then somhow, impossibly, something hit him from the side and drove him off his horse, and instead of being bathed in fire it was water that greeted him, and as he sank he watched the air where he had been turn into an inferno. 

As he sank, Jaime cursed himself for yet another failure. He had missed his chance and there would like as not never be another to put an end to the Dragon Queen before she claimed any more lives than she had already. Jaime hoped that perhaps one day, another opportunity would present itself, even if it wasn’t to him personally, though he knew in his heart of hearts that such a thing was an impossible dream. He had tried and he had failed, and all he could do now was do his best to convince Cersei to see reason and surrender, though there was precious little hope of that either. Life was not a bard’s tale, and he was no shining hero. He was only an old, one handed Knight whose best years were long behind him, and as he acknowledged that bitter truth darkness rose up from the gloomy depths and swallowed him up whole, and he knew no more.


End file.
